Bell Hooks Love Trilogy (Hardcover)
2 total works 3 total works planned
Where does love come in the culture and history of black people? In this book, Bell Hooks's critical insight traces the ethic of love in the context of black lives. She examines the literary debate on love and dehumanization in the work of writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison and representations of love in film and television, including programmes like the "Cosby Show". Hooks talks to rappers; she traces the history of love from slavery, through the words of Martin Luther King and the Black Power Movement to the present day. She considers different domestic situations, including single mothers and black gays and lesbians. She also considers the effect on the black community of the deaths of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
"The word "love" is most often defined as a noun, yet...we would all love better if we used it as a verb," writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, the renowned scholar, cultural critic, and feminist skewers our view of love as romance. In its place she offers a proactive new ethic for a people and a society bereft with lovelessness. As bell hooks uses her incisive mind and razor-sharp pen to explore the question "What is love?" her answers strike at both the mind and heart. In thirteen concise chapters, hooks examines her own search for emotional connection and society's failure to provide a model for learning to love. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for the individuals and for a nation. The Utne Reader declared bell hooks one of the "100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life." All About Love is a powerful affirmation of just how profoundly she can.